Trying to play down the significance
of an ongoing WikiLeaks
dump of more than
250,000 State Department documents, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
recently offered the following bit of Washington wisdom:
“The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s
in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust
us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets…. [S]ome governments
deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most
because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before,
the indispensable nation.”

Now, wisdom like that certainly
sounds sober; it’s definitely what passes for hardheaded geopolitical
realism in our nation’s capital; and it’s true, Gates is not
the first top American official to call
the U.S. “the
indispensable nation”; nor do I doubt that he and many other inside-the-Beltway
players are convinced of our global indispensability. The problem is
that the news has almost weekly been undermining his version of realism,
making it look ever more phantasmagorical. The ability of WikiLeaks,
a tiny organization of activists, to thumb its cyber-nose at the global
superpower, repeatedly shining a blaze of illumination on the penumbra of secrecy under which its political and military
elite like to conduct their affairs, hasn’t helped one bit either.
If our indispensability is, as yet, hardly questioned in Washington,
elsewhere on the planet it’s another
matter.

The once shiny badge of the
“global sheriff” has lost its gleam and, in Dodge City, ever fewer
are paying the sort of attention that Washington believes is its due.
To my mind, the single most intelligent comment on the latest WikiLeaks
uproar comes
from Simon Jenkins
of the British Guardian who, on making his way through the various revelations (not to speak of the mounds of global gossip), summed matters up this way: “The
money-wasting is staggering. [U.S.] Aid payments are never followed,
never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world’s superpower
roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran,
Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually
off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial
but its power projection unproductive.”

Sometimes, to understand just
where you are in the present, it helps to peer into the past – in this
case, into what happened to previous “indispensable” imperial powers;
sometimes, it’s no less useful to peer into the future. In his latest TomDispatch post, Alfred W. McCoy, author most recently
of Policing
America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise
of the Surveillance State,
does both. Having convened a global working group of 140 historians
to consider the fate of the U.S. as an imperial power, he offers us
a glimpse of four possible American (near-)futures. They add up to a
monumental, even indispensable look at just how fast our indispensability
is likely to unravel in the years to come. Tom

The Decline and Fall of
the American Empire

Four scenarios for the end of the American Century by 2025
by Alfred W. McCoy

A soft landing for America
40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States
as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines.
If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American
Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests
that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for
the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence
most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that
they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that,
when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy
speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight
years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain,
and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from
the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely
to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that
year as the start of America’s downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed
that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and
civilians slaughtered, this 21st-century imperial collapse could
come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse
or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington’s
global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders
of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life.
As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends
to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing
at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political
temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational,
and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power,
negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach
a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed
so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading
by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

Significantly, in 2008, the
U.S. National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that
America’s global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one
of its periodic
futuristic reports,
Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and
economic powernow under way, roughly from West to East”
and “without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor
in the decline of the “United States’ relative strength – even in
the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s
analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global
preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the U.S. would long
“retain unique military capabilities … to project military power
globally” for decades to come.

No such luck. Under current
projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind
China (already the world’s second largest economy) in economic output
around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation
is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military
technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America’s current
supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate
replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.

By 2020, according to current
plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying
empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace
robotics that represents Washington’s last best hope of retaining global
power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however,
China’s global network of communications satellites, backed by the world’s
most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing
Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space
and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into
every quadrant of the globe.

Wrapped in imperial hubris,
like Whitehall or Quai d’Orsay before it, the White House still seems
to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial.
In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept
second place for the United States of America.” A few days later,
Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined
to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy’s prophecy that we are going to
be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy
and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the
establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy
guru Joseph Nye waved
away talk of China’s
economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic
decline” and denying that any deterioration in U.S. global power was
underway.

Ordinary Americans,
watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their
cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65 percent of Americans believed the
country was now “in a state of decline.” Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional U.S. military allies,
are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval
maneuvers with China. Already, America’s closest economic partners are
backing away from Washington’s opposition to China’s rigged currency
rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a
gloomy New York Times headline summed
the moment up this
way: “Obama’s Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain,
and Germany Challenge U.S., Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”

Viewed historically, the question
is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power,
but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place
of Washington’s wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence
Council’s own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios
for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.S. global power could reach
its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just
where we are today). The future scenarios include: economic decline,
oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III. While these are
hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even
collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.

Economic Decline: Present
Situation

Today, three main threats exist
to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic
clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American
technological innovation, and the end of the dollar’s privileged status
as the global reserve currency.

By 2008, the United States
had already fallen to number three in global merchandise
exports, with just 11 percent of them compared to 12 percent for China and 16 percent for
the European Union. There is no reason to believe that this trend will
reverse itself.

Similarly, American leadership
in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the U.S. was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications
with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering
400 percent increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the
U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology &
Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based
competitiveness” during the previous decade. Adding substance to these
statistics, in October China’s Defense Ministry unveiled the world’s
fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one U.S. expert, that it “blows
away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.

Add to this clear evidence
that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and
innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the
world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the
country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic
Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd
among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science
instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences
in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not
staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the
United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

Such negative trends are encouraging
increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve
currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea
that the U.S. knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief
economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the
world’s central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury
notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially
maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve
currency.”

Simultaneously, China’s central
bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global
reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is,
the U.S. dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of
a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the
U.S. financial-military world order.”

Economic Decline: Scenario
2020

After years of swelling deficits
fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected,
the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world’s reserve
currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling
deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is
finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure
at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds
of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is
far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower
incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other
powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over
the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever rising
unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions
widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably
irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair,
a far-Right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric,
demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation
or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American
Century ends in silence.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America’s waning
economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by
America’s gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the
world’s number one energy consumer this summer, a position the U.S.
had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will
“set the pace in shaping our global future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will
control almost half of the world’s natural gas supply, which will potentially
give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum
reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia
and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Despite remarkable ingenuity,
the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves
that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the
Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP’s sloppy
safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”:
one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for
what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the
surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.

Compounding the problem, the
Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers.
Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t),
demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise – and sharply at that.
Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging
into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The
United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop
alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports.
Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36 percent of energy consumed in the
U.S. to 66 percent.

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025

The United States remains so
dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global
energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the
1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the
proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar’s plummeting value, OPEC
oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a
“basket” of yen, yuan, and euros. That only hikes the cost of U.S.
oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series
of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their
own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the yuan. Meanwhile, China
pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline
and funding Iran’s exploitation of the world largest natural gas field
at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

Concerned that the U.S. Navy
might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the
Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu
Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China’s new
fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian
Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure,
London agrees to cancel the U.S. lease on its Indian Ocean island base
of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington
that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport,
effectively evicting the U.S. Navy from the Indian Ocean.

With just a few strokes of
the pen and some terse announcements, the
“Carter Doctrine,”
by which U.S. military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf,
is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United
States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region – logistics,
exchange rates, and naval power – evaporate. At this point, the U.S.
can still cover only an insignificant
12 percent of its energy
needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent
on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows
hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights,
making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages
(which had long been declining) into free fall, and rendering non-competitive
whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices
climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for
costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances
at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. military forces finally
begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, the U.S.
is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on
the American Century.

Military Misadventure: Present
Situation

Counterintuitively, as their
power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures.
This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism”
and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the
sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly
and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial
point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating
defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the
ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into
military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened
Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying
imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber
guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its
prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the U.S. occupied
Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over
the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to
100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters
large and small in this guerrilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of
empires.

Military Misadventure: Scenario
2014

So irrational, so unpredictable
is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon
outdone by actual events. With the U.S. military stretched thin from
Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and
Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad
are multifold.

It’s mid-summer 2014 and
a drawn-down U.S. garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan
is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while U.S.
aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken
and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1
bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city
that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky”
gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.

Soon, mullahs are preaching
jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units,
long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to
desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably
sophisticated strikes aimed at U.S. garrisons across the country, sending
American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975,
U.S. helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops
in Kabul and Kandahar.

Meanwhile, angry at the endless,
decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new
oil embargo on the U.S. to protest its backing of Israel as well as
the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars
across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries
running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations
forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks
a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells.
As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the U.N. to bitterly
denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history
to brand this “America’s Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956
debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military
tensions between the U.S. and China began to rise in the western Pacific,
once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would
have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance
with London to appropriate much of Britain’s global power after World
War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with
the U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American
dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources,
Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long
dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South
China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim,
Beijing’s official Global Timesresponded
angrily, saying,
“The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has
raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet
will be.”

Amid growing tensions, the
Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability
to attack … [U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean”
and target “nuclear forces throughout … the continental United States.”
By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyber warfare capabilities,”
China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls
“the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.”
With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket,
as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010
and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing
signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent”
network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and
reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.

To check China and extend its
military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital
network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities,
and electronic surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated
system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire
armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field
or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon
will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones – reaching from stratosphere
to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular
satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.

Last April, the Pentagon made
history. It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into
a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B is the first in a
new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization
of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that
has gone before.

World War III: Scenario
2025

The technology of space and
cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios
may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply
employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game,
however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and
cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next
world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving
Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy
for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, U.S. Air
Force technicians at the Space
Surveillance Telescope
(SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly
blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand’s operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect
malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital
fingerprints of
China’s People’s Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one
nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics
aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S. “Vulture”
drone as it flies
at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It
suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan,
sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow
Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with
fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that
its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite
system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit
robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles
above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator”
missiles at China’s
35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches
its Falcon
Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle
into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes
later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites
in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads
uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate
U.S. supercomputers fail to crack the malware’s devilishly complex code,
GPS signals crucial to the navigation of U.S. ships and aircraft worldwide
are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific.
Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the
horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United
States loses what the U.S. Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space.
Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly
a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human
casualty.

A New World Order?

Even if future events prove
duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points
toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025
than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.

As allies worldwide begin to
realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the
cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply
become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling
Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race to weaponize space
and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making
military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more,
the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will
not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after
World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic.
They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which
Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy
into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation
or more of economic misery.

As U.S. power recedes, the
past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order. At
one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however
unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential
cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies,
and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global
dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the
horizon likely to succeed the U.S.

In a dark, dystopian version
of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral
forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably
forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make
it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. While denationalized
corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world
from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban
and rural wastelands.

In Planet
of Slums, Mike
Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom
up. He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style
slums worldwide (rising to 2 billion by 2030) will make “the ‘feral,
failed cities’ of the Third World … the distinctive battlespace of
the 21st century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela,
“the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as
“hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow
streets of the slum districts…. Every morning the slums reply with
suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”

At a midpoint on the spectrum
of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020
and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating
with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States
to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance
of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.

Another possibility: the rise
of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international
system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian
world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked
exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region – Brasilia
in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern
Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed
from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United
States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an
expanded U.N. Security Council or some ad hoc body.

All of these scenarios extrapolate
existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded
by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot
or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global
position.

If America’s decline is in
fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already
frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that
distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert
sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 15 years remain, the
odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the
president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate
money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that
any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national
security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy
supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the
sort of soft landing that might maximize our country’s role and prosperity
in a changing world.

Europe’s empires are gone and
America’s imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the
United States will have anything like Britain’s success in shaping a
succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity,
and bears the imprint of its best values.

Alfred W. McCoy is professor
of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author, most recently,
of Policing
America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise
of the Surveillance State
(2009). He is also the convener of the “Empires
in Transition”
project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities
on four continents. The results of their first meetings at Madison,
Sydney, and Manila were published as Colonial
Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State and the findings from their latest
conference will appear next year as Endless Empire: Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Ascent, and the
Decline of U.S. Global Power.

201203324420 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2Fengelhardt%2F2010%2F12%2F05%2Ftaking-down-america%2FTaking+Down+America2010-12-06+06%3A00%3A04Tom+Engelhardthttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012033244 to “Taking Down America”

I don't need to read 4 scenarios that suggest how the U.S. might be taken down!

It needs to be taken down because it's reached its use-by date, because it's become a nuisance, a deranged bully, a rogue nation, a danger to the whole world, a parody of what it once stood for, a laughing stock, a haven for carpetbaggers and religious fruitcakes, an elitist entity thats greatest joy is to kill people who can't fight back, to take their resources, to bomb their countries into destruction.

I'm saddened by what the U.S. has become under its sick leadership. Once I admired it. No more. The sooner it leave via stage left the better!http://www.dangerouscreation.com

The claim that another oil shock will bring America down and leave China and India in positions of power doesn't make a lot of sense.Another oil shock will bring everyone down.China may be in better shape to handle an oil shock than the U.S. but all that that means is that China will just go down a little slower than the U.S.,not that China won't go down also.The 2025 date that the author keeps referring to also doesn't make a lot of sense.A barrel of oil,as of two days ago,was selling just $12 short of $100 a barrel and this is during a world wide recession.I would say that Mexico will halt oil exports within 3 to 5 years and Canada's oil exports are mostly from tar sands now.I would think that the oil shock will come much sooner than 2025.

I must agree with El Cid that environmental factors like water, temperature rise, sea level rise, and food and fuel shortages, plus the increased unrest of huge, unwieldy, rioting populations across the globe are going to make this scenario unlikely. What's more likely in my mind is that things will get so unstable that horrid virusses aimed at knocking out millions of people will be released, or countries will fracture with nukes taken over by nutcases who will fire them. China's rise will not be as pretty as it has been – they're in for some bubbles popping. Russia is going to be on fire along with Canada, but they can prob deal with it still since they have so many resources. My own prediction is that the 21st century is going to be Mother Nature's, not any nation's.

There's also a good chance the USA will muscle in on Canada's resources and make them an offer they can't refuse, kicking the Chinese out at the same time. High education won't matter much with tech systems like you mention only good for hours. A MIRV-tipped independent nuke is still a self-contained reliable awful weapon. Your notion that these cyberwars will happen with no death or move to deadly force is the most preposterous part of your argument. Just such notions were ridiculed during the Cold War. In a world of overpopulation and starvation, human life will have even less value, and once the white europeans and americans are knocked out of their complacency, they will fight as raw as any rising third world group of people, possibly to the extent of ethnic cleansing, which really will herald the end of N America, although it could just mean cutting off the Southwest and Texas, which is happening already (and making them horrendous war ruins in the process).

Dude, grow up. If you think any of the old world countries like Russia or China or the UK or Germany or Spain or Israel or the most undemocratic people on earth, the Muslims are any better a country than the USA, you have got be dreaming. Those countries have all been genocidal maniacs so take your propaganda and shove it.

Guest (see above) reveals the biggest flaw that America has: its people can't handle being told what they really are, preferring to see themselves as superior, exceptional, larger than life, etc.

Dude, I suggest you travel a bit, speak to other people in the world (there are other people in the world, you know), see how different other cultures are, how superior to the MacDonalds and Coke culture they are, how they are not consumed by greed and how they long for peace and equality and justice for themselves and their families.

The U.S. is no icon. It is a warmongering, ruthless, rogue nation. If you don't like the truth, then too bad. There are a lot of Americans who are intelligent enough to see where America is going wrong and they desperately want to do something about it. For starters, this site is about being anti-war (which runs against everything that most Americans seem to live for).

Good analysis. I just wonder, though, if it will take until 2025. I would have said more likely 2015. One thing is certain: the landing will be pretty hard, like the Soviet Union, and for much the same reason. The US elite is still largely in denial as to what is coming and, instead of reforming the system, are desperately trying to prop it up. That means that the house of cards will fold very suddenly. Who imagined, when those East Germans headed off to Hungary for their summer holidays in 1989, that they would set off a political landslide which would take down all the European communist regimes within 2 years? Some little thing like that will finally do in the American dinosaur.

Frigtening, but brilliant analysis by a renowned author. In addition to the competition from China, Iran and Russia, and if the Republicans continue to have their say, and it appears our president has neither the will or the way to oppose them, and if they castrate Social Security and Medicare as they threaten to do, continue to placate the rich, witness corporate largesse in the form of profits and huge bonuses, domestic tranquility could disappear hastening sundown for the Empire..

"The prediction of the decline and fall of the US Empire is based on the synergy of 14 contradictions, and the time span for the contradictions to work their way through decline to fall was estimated at 25 years in the year 2000. There are more contradictions because the US Empire is more complex, and the time span is longer also because it is more sophisticated. After the first months of President George W. Bush (selected) the time span was reduced to 20 years because of the way in which he sharpened so many of the contradictions posited the year before, and because his extreme singlemindedness made him blind to the negative, complex synergies. He just continued." – Johan Galtung

I don't think reading is your greatest skill there, Guest. Your interpretation of what he said is far from the reality of what he said. I suggest you take an English class – or two – before taking it upon yourself to correct others.

David, what you describe in your post is, in essence, an Empire in decline. Read the history or any other empire – particularly the Roman one after which the US was modeled – and you'll see it all in there. What you see is the monster kicking in desperation while on its last leg.

Notice that in the imagined WWIII the Chinese win not by destroying populations, but by disarming the bully on the block. This is in keeping with Confucianism. I urge the reader to look at the book 1421: the year the Chinese discovered America, by Gavin Menzies, a former UK submarine commander. The Chinese then were setting out to explore the world, and bring it into its trading and mercantilism sphere, while de-emphasizing the reliance on the military. In fact its ships and commanders were eunuchs so they would not be driven by testosterone-driven, alpha males (think Stanley McChrystal or Douglas MacArthur) to create a world of armed conflict.

Maybe it is not China itself that is the biggest threat to the USG, but the fevered imagination of China, a monstrous double in the eyes of American planners. In the world of fourth generation warfare it is just a matter of time till the empire implodes. I was surprised with the quaint notion in the article that China would some day have aircraft carriers — they may not prove to be necessary.

China isn't trillions in debt, fighting two failed wars and maintaining 1,000 imperial military bases around the world. The Chinese leaders, unlike America's, act in their countrys best interests. Just imagine there were a bunch of islands in the North sea claimed by half a dozen European states. Do you think China would stick its nose in there, like America has with the Spratly's? Did the Chinese stick their nose in the Balkans and make a needless enemy of the Serbs? America has built up a tsunami of bad karma and it is gonna bite her in the ass someday.

Excellent speculation. The mind that is thinking ahead is the one
ready to face and deal with the future hard times.
It's the neoconservative – religious right – tea party – both parties DC elite who are going to be caught off guard by this because they still have their heads buried to the hilt in post-WWII american exceptionalism… They're also the ones who cry foul at any suggested changes/innovations in any area, because either it's 'socialism' or it's practiced by some other culture, therefore it's 'unamerican' and heaven-forbid we ever copy any good idea from Asia, Latin America or Europe… that would be admitting we're not exceptional – the horror! We couldn't call ourselves 'real' americans anymore…

God, I'm so sick of these people and their brain-dead ideology divorced from context, fact, reason or common sense. There would be more hope for their self-inflicted demise and humbling – if it weren't for their gun and violence fetish… – No Casualties! Ha – Innocents are going to perish in the last-gasp, rat-in-the-corner freak-out as the Pentagon and warmonger exceptionalists desparaterly try to hang on to what they think is a divine right – ie world dominion…
My last note of doom – It will be those same elite – especially the corporate neo-conservative types, who will make sure they get off unscathed when the thing crumbles…As a pacifist, the only justice I can count on is a hastening of their hellish eternal reward…may it come quickly

Great article.
Just my 2 eurocents here. Everybody should read the book "After the Empire" by french historian and demograph Emmanuel Todd. It was written back in 2002 and everything's already in there.
It's an absolute must read.